Search form

Search form

All eyes are on President Barack Obama on the eve of the Group of 20 summit in London. Yet even other Western leaders -- from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Germany's Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- appear unwilling to follow the lead of the U.S. To Yale management professor Jeffrey Garten, it's a paradox. "Everyone has lost confidence in the U.S. system because the more that is revealed, the more it feels as if we pursued capitalism in a very irresponsible way," he says. "But everyone is now waiting for the U.S. to bail them out."

Related Summaries

On the eve of a meeting with President Barack Obama, Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev indicated he was unwilling to agree to new limits on nuclear warheads without a U.S. compromise on missile defenses in Eastern Europe. "We consider these issues are interconnected," Medvedev said on Russian television.

Executives unwittingly kill innovation by focusing too much on customer research and looking for magic bullets, writes consultant Stuart Cross. Think of innovation as a daily exercise, he suggests. "3M is the avatar of this approach, allowing its developers to spend a proportion of their time on their own development projects as a way of encouraging a stream of bottom-up ideas," he writes.

Google has a celebrated history of introducing hoax applications on April Fool's Day. Remember "AdSense for Conversations?" It was going to let us display topic-linked ads on inconspicuous screens above our heads as we spoke. Or PigeonRank? Google Romance? How about the one that would let us send e-mails in the past? Google Australia apparently kicked off the hilarity early today with gBall, an overly smart device that "will change Australian rules football as we know it."

A company's internal entrepreneurs may have the bright ideas that can lead it out of the darkness, but determining which ideas are worth pursuing remains a challenge, observes columnist Stefan Stern. Organizations tend to view corporate entrepreneurs as self-promoters and empire-builders, said Julian Birkinshaw, a strategy professor at London Business School. "In principle, there is enormous enthusiasm for them," he said. "In practice, there can also be great suspicion."

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will articulate some broad outlines for renewed cooperation between the nations, whose relationship has become increasingly strained in recent years. Emphasizing arms cuts and dialog about the relationship the nations have with Iran, the direct talks with Medvedev represent the new face of diplomacy Obama has promised for U.S. foreign policy.